On 16 November Leros fell to the Germans, after what Churchill described as ‘unexpectedly strong resistance’, another phrase he copied from an Enigma decrypt (he had marked approvingly a phrase used by the local German commander reporting back in identical terms). Not for the first time the Germans had put their own gloss on ‘enemy’ intentions, reasoning that if they were in the other’s shoes, this is what they would be doing or at least thinking. No wonder Churchill found their reports so stimulating, yet so discouraging. The Turks, without access to Boniface55 were also impressed. Aware that both Britain and Russia were by now agreed on a policy of forcing them into the war, they found the discomfiture of the British in the Aegean a convenient way of postponing their decision from the autumn of 1943 until the spring of 1944. Even then only a token support was forthcoming, and it was another year before they actually joined the Allies.
Under intense diplomatic pressure from both sides I·nönü allowed Germany as well as Britain to infringe Turkish territorial integrity under certain conditions well understood by both adversaries.56 One of the many Oshima reports told Churchill and the FO how things were between Germany and Turkey that autumn. The full paragraph is quoted in a note at the end of this chapter, but a summary of it dated 18 December 1943 was passed from ‘C’ to Robertson, to Martin for ‘Colonel Warden’ (Churchill):
Churchill and Roosevelt carried out Tehran decision by pressing strongly for Turkish entry into the war, which USSR also desired urgently. Churchill threatened to suspend supplies to Turkey and Eden also took a menacing stand but Roosevelt adopted no such attitude. Turkish Foreign Minister told Papen that he was firmly convinced that even England was not strong enough to risk Turkish enmity by applying sanctions and that USA would in any case refuse to participate: Turkey had given absolutely no promise of entry into the war.
Ribbentrop’s comment was that Germany made it clear that Turkey would be considered to have entered the war if land and air bases were granted even without direct participation.57 The American High Command continued to refuse pressurising Turkey, or to allocate troops, landing craft or fighter aircraft to the eastern Mediterranean, accepting as a fait accompli that Russian successes in eastern Europe would leave the whole area open to Soviet aggression at some point in the future. Smolensk had fallen to the Russians on 25 September and on the 22nd the Red Army had crossed the Dneiper, the ‘Eastern Rampart’ south of Kiev, hailed nervously by the Turkish oligarchs in Ankara. The great Russian counter-offensive was about to unbalance still further the international politics of the eastern Mediterranean.
Turkey and the Dodecanese
While these stirring events were taking place by land and sea, diplomatic moves regarding Turkey and the Aegean were high on Churchill’s agenda. On 10 October Eden was able to report to Churchill that:
. . . the Turks have shown themselves unexpectedly co-operative in the matter [of Cos and Leros: the Turks were also unexpectedly co-operating with the Germans]. They have certainly strained their neutrality and their action [in offering protection to British warships off their western coast] is the subject of German protest.
On the same day Eden was to meet Wilson to see if ‘there is any help we can give him with the Turks.’ Churchill’s Turkey hand had depended crucially on British success in the Dodecanese. Wilson’s failure there not only depressed the Turks but signalled the end of Churchill’s unilateral Turkey policy. His own account of the Dodecanese debacle is full of suppressed fury but free of hindsight.58 He quotes his own speeches to Stalin at Tehran about Turkey. He prevaricated when Stalin asked what he would expect from the Soviet ‘in case Turkey declares war on Germany, as a result of which Bulgaria attacks Turkey and the Soviet Union declares war on Bulgaria.’ Poor Mr Eden had to ask for enlightenment: what exactly had Churchill in mind in getting Turkey into the war? Churchill recalls:
Although I felt how deeply Turkish minds had been affected by the loss of Cos and Leros, and the consequent German command of the air in the Aegean, I left the subject, having got all I had thought it right to ask, and with fair hopes that it would not be insufficient.
This, perhaps, is his own epitaph on his Turkey policy.
On 19 October the opening of the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Moscow saw the beginnings of a new and unwelcome Russian phase of aggressive interest in Turkey. By the end of it the Red Army had cut off the German-held Crimea and recaptured Kiev on 6 November. Eden played up to Russian demands and confirmed ‘there was no disagreement between the Allies as to the desirability of bringing Turkey into the war’. On 2 November a joint protocol was signed whereby Turkey would be asked to come in before the end of 1943. Roosevelt was reluctant and the Turks furious.59
It was against this background that Menemencioğlu met Eden in Cairo on 5–7 November. The meeting was not a success.60 Eden offered Turkey a phased entry, beginning with the offer of bases and a movement from pure neutrality, but the Turkish foreign minister saw no advantage to his country in such a concession. The phased entry, which both Russia and Turkey thought pointless and counterproductive, was propounded nevertheless by the British because they realised that their successful Turkey-based deception plan would be exposed if Turkey immediately entered the war – and the great flow of seasoned Allied troops into Turkey failed to take place. Eden told Churchill, ‘My persuasions were the less effective as both [Menemencioğlu and Açikalin] seemed to be particularly deaf.’61 Deafness proved a useful device, and a report circulated in Cairo:
. . . that all the Turks were wearing hearing devices so imperfectly attuned to one another that they all went out of order at the same time whenever mention was made of the possibility of Turkey’s coming into the war.62
Eden commented that German sources (by which he was presumably referring to Boniface) reported their successful brush-off of British forces from the Dodecanese.63 The next day Churchill noted ‘the nadir of Turco/British relations’.64
On the same day the Forschungsamt in Berlin intercepted reports of the Moscow Conference and showed them to Hitler, who read a German version of:
At Menemencioğlu’s request Eden had had talks with him in Cairo. While there he advised him of the Soviet demand for military bases in Turkey . . . Eden represented the Soviet case only half-heartedly, and did not make it at all difficult for Turkey to reject them.65
He, or Ribbentrop or Kaltenbrunner, would also have been reading the British FO’s correspondence to Ambassador Hugessen, as November was a productive month in Cicero’s career as an international spy.66
Turkish neutrality remained even-handed, and despite the arguments and quarrels Turkey declared on 17 November that she would come into the war, but the Turkish press and public considered they had been bounced into action of which they did not approve. One journalist told Deringil that Britain was suspected of intending to face Turkey with a fait accompli by giving her just enough aircraft to provoke a German attack. Molotov’s keenness at Moscow to have Turkey in quickly reverted to a more detached attitude, on the basis that he hoped thereby to separate Turkey from Britain, thus laying the ground for the Soviet postwar policy towards Turkey.67 At Tehran later that month (28 November) Churchill offered to lay before I·nönü ‘the ugly case which would result from the failure of Turkey to accept the invitation to join the war, and the appetising picture of what help could be offered her if she did’.68 He tried to go on playing the Turkey hand long after British intervention in the affairs of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean countries had ceased to be of consequence to the countries concerned.
The Dodecanese debacle rankled in Whitehall. Had Churchill agreed at this stage to anticipate Turkey’s joining the Allies by putting the politics of the area under Macmillan, a different outcome to the state of affairs in the eastern Mediterranean might have resulted, with considerable after-effects stretching through to the postwar period. But after Adana Churchill was not in the mood to give Turkey to anyone, not even, indeed, to the FO. For he could study Turkey through BJ
s, but Wilson and Macmillan could not. Nor could Eisenhower, who only received briefing political analyses compiled from them; and recipients such as the FO and MEW lacked the authority to act on their authenticity and immediacy.
To sum up the Dodecanese operation: those without access to BJs lacked the power or knowledge to enforce decisions, and this led to the debacle and an unresolved conflict between Churchill and the other Allied war planners as to the priority rating of the eastern Mediterranean in the context of victory in the west and on the Eastern Front.
Churchill and Turkey: November 1943
This section analyses the complex causes which led to German victory in the eastern Mediterranean in November 1943.
The Dodecanese debacle had robbed Churchill of his credibility in the eastern Mediterranean. After mid-September when Rhodes was entirely in German hands, one island after another saw the weak invading forces of Britain capitulating, and drastic losses suffered by the British navy. The Turks took full advantage, and Churchill noted: ‘Turkey, witnessing the extraordinary inertia of the Allies near her shores, became much less forthcoming and denied us her airfields.’69 The FO expected the loss of Cos and Leros similarly to affect the Turks. Clutton wrote on 20 October that:
. . . we have no chance whatsoever of getting anything serious from the Turks until we have got the Dodecanese . . . in fact we missed the bus when we allowed 30,000 Italians on Rhodes to capitulate to 7,000 Germans.
Deringil met many eyewitnesses of the British disaster at Bodrum, opposite Cos, who all remembered the pell-mell retreat and the awe inspired by German aggressiveness.70
The official British military historian’s account draws as heavily on Churchill’s war history as almost every subsequent historian has done. He opens his account of ‘the star-crossed British operation in the Aegean during the period September to the end of November 1943’ by citing the occupation of Cos in mid-September:
[It] then fell to the German attack on 3 and 4 October. The island of Leros was garrisoned by a battalion in mid-September, was reinforced at intervals up to 11 November and was lost between 12 and 16 November . . . The forces employed during the whole period were not great but the losses were grievous. The land forces amounted to five battalions and some supporting arms and were lost. The naval forces, never all engaged at once, were 6 cruisers and 33 destroyers including 7 Greek, a few submarines, some lesser ships and craft. 4 cruisers were damaged, 6 destroyers were sunk and 4 were damaged, two submarines and coastal craft and minesweepers were sunk . . . 282 aircraft flew 3,746 sorties. 113 Allied aircraft were lost, including 50% of the Beaufighter strength.71
Who was responsible? Captain Stephen Roskill was in no doubt. The British chain of command was faulty, and Churchill, as Minister of Defence, as well as the COS, should have clarified it before encouraging operations in the eastern theatre on a considerable scale. The three C-in-Cs in the Middle East (Admiral A.U. Willis from 14 October, General Maitland Wilson and ACM Sholto Douglas) were a theoretically equal triumirate. But Churchill, with his special relationship to Wilson from whom he liked to hear direct, sent his Dodecanese messages only to Wilson. Moreover, while Wilson and Willis were independent C-in-Cs, Douglas was subordinate to Tedder, and relations between them were bad, as both made clear in their memoirs. Roskill also points to Churchill’s ‘illusion’ about Turkish involvement ‘for the Turks could not have defended themselves as long as the Germans held Greece and most of the Aegean islands. When in 1944 the Germans were forced to withdraw from Greece, the islands fell into our hands virtually uncontested.’
The Aegean campaign of late 1943 lasted from the Italian surrender in September to the Allied evacuation of Samos by caique into Turkey in late November.72 Hitler’s determination to hold on to Crete and Rhodes, it was acknowledged, resulted in a crushing local defeat for the British forces involved. Cos had fallen in two days (3–4 October) and Leros in five (12–16 November) to ‘brilliantly improvised German and amphibious and airborne attacks launched from Athens and Crete’. What went wrong, particularly with the Royal Navy, given Allied naval superiority in the Mediterranean?
There was the mistimed change of command at the top. British destroyers laid up in Turkish waters by day – where Hitler forbade their being bombed by the Luftwaffe (as the Enigma decrypts of 12 October showed) – failed to protect or deliver British invading forces. There was American reluctance to commit troops on a scheme in which Roosevelt’s military advisers had no interest. Boniface and BJs (as HW1 confirms) provided full intelligence of German moves, yet the Germans achieved an unintercepted tactical surprise landing of troops on Leros. The defenders of the island were not surprised as the invasion convoy was tracked, but it had also to be intercepted; this it was not. After land fighting as bitter as for Crete in 1941, the Allied garrison surrendered on 16 November. A recent war historian quotes from contemporary press reports and adds that:
. . . they point to the twin problems of poor planning and equally poor execution resulting in the sacrifice of an entire infantry brigade, corps troops, and special forces, as well as frightful naval losses due to enemy air attack. The effort sustained did not achieve the primary objectives (Rhodes and Turkey) nor the secondary objectives (Cos and Leros).73
Jeremy Holland asks who in Whitehall was responsible? This book shows that the possession of vital signals intelligence about the enemy’s plans and needs – which Churchill and Alanbrooke and Wilson all had – was not in itself sufficient to provide victory over Müller and his superiors, who, pressurised by Hitler, overcame all obstacles and won a brilliant if short-lived victory. Churchill very publicly accepted responsibility for defeat though continuing to criticise Eisenhower and Tedder – and by implication the US High Command – for failing to see the point of the operation and take the comparatively modest steps needed to bring off a surprise victory. Improvise and dare: neither option stood very high in the perceived priorities of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
For the British all went wrong not only because there was no co-ordination of operations, but because the FO on the sidelines resisted a suggestion which seemed obvious – to bring Turkish forces in. The War Office also reasonably opposed the plan, arguing that Turkish forces lacked training in or experience of combined operations. None the less superiority in numbers and the closeness of Turkish air and naval bases to the Dodecanese should have helped Britain towards victory. The FO can be seen to be limited to preserving Turkey as its private possession, which she would remain so long as she did not take up arms against the Axis. But the official historian of the war at sea rightly concludes that most of the responsibility rests with Churchill ‘whose addiction to the capture of islands which would prove difficult to supply’ was well known.
That he strongly resented Roosevelt’s refusal to help is proved by the telegram about holding Leros . . . when he told him [misquoting St Matthew] that ‘even the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs’. Furthermore his hope of bringing Turkey into the war, which was the principal plank on which he rested his case, was an illusion: for the Turks could not have defended themselves as long as the Germans held Greece and most of the Aegean Islands . . . Yet the Aegean fiasco was a tragic, and one may feel a wholly unnecessary ending to a year which had brought important and long-awaited successes.
Molony’s 1973 account of the Dodecanese requires neither alteration, emendation or supplementation, and Roskill’s conclusion about Churchill’s responsibility is one which no amount of intercept reading is likely to affect.74
On 18 November Adm Kelly, Churchill’s special naval appointee in Ankara, arranged the withdrawal as well as evacuation of stragglers from Leros, and was now in Smyrna. The same day Churchill telegraphed Wilson: ‘I approve your conduct . . . there was a serious loss and reverse but I feel I have been fighting with one hand tied behind my back.’75 The next day sunset reports for Churchill told him the Germans were poised to beat the British and Italians. Churchill and Wilson were mortified.76 But othe
r tasks were to await them.
A comparison between Churchill’s political performance off the Turkish coast in 1915 and 1943 is instructive. In the First World War, strategic objectives were set by the War Cabinet and carried out by the commanders of the armed forces. Churchill failed to produce a consensus on a viable operation at the Dardanelles that would have achieved his intended effect of neutralising Turkey, despite his enormous influence as First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1943 his powers were much greater, as the third of the Big Three. But even that, as we have seen, did not enable him to carry through his objective of retaking the islands. His powers were still limited, and his plans thwarted, by the Americans and the COS and the need to concentrate the western Allies’ forces on the invasion of Italy. Hitler, on the other hand, with absolute power even after Stalingrad, simply overruled his generals and won the contest. Two failures off the Turkish coast, in 1915 and 1943, were both large, public and acknowledged by Churchill.
The Conferences
Churchill still persisted, writing to Eden in Moscow as late as 20 November:
I remain convinced of the great importance of our getting a foothold in the Aegean by taking Rhodes, re-taking Cos, and holding Leros and building up an effective Air and naval superiority in these waters. Do the Russians . . . think this is a good idea, for its effect on Turkey?77
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